Team Feedback
We generally prefer to keep meetings to a minimum as we prefer more immediate and efficient means of communication. But we also understand that growing as individuals and as an effective team takes regular and constructive feedback sessions.
Group Feedback
Daily Stand-up
True to the core tenants of agile methodologies, we hold the morning routine of daily stand-ups with everyone, including not only Developers but also Product Managers, UX/UI designers and support roles such as Office Manager and Talent Manager.
The stand-up is the occasion to have a company-wide overview of the daily progress and struggles.
While we used to organize it with all people physically present in one location, as the team grew and we could no longer keep it under 10 minutes, we have settled on doing the daily stand-up asynchronously via Standuply on Slack.
Everyone must fill in the details to the following questions between 9 and 10 AM:
- Work planned for today
- Blocker or unexpected issues
While it’s the norm for daily stand-ups to inquire about the work accomplished during the previous work day, we have decided not to include it with the explicit goal to focus on actionable information. Today is actionable, yesterday is not. Daily stand-ups are not meant to be a laundry list or an activity log. Project management tools and code repositories are better at providing information on what has been completed at any given time.
As not everyone is working on the same project, we keep the narrative to a high level and we aim at making it interesting for all teammates. Each individual narrative should be understandable without being involved in the project.
Bi-weekly Retrospective
The retrospective can be held either 1) by chapter e.g. iOS retrospective on Wednesdays or 2) by squad.
Our retrospective meetings are the occasion to:
- Review the previous sprint accomplishments and struggles.
- Plan the future sprints.
- Present and review a new methodology or process.
These meetings are encouraged but not compulsory for every stack or project. Planning a project or stack retrospective is the project’s team lead discretion.
Monthly All-hands
Our all-hands meetings are the opportunity to get an overall picture of our recent achievements, challenges, and plans for the short and medium terms.
Individual Feedback
One-on-one
One-on-one meetings are set up as a channel to provide individual feedback to each teammate. It is the occasion to review the successes and the areas of improvement so that we can plan the course of action for the next period together by defining objectives (OKR).
One-on-ones are also meant for teammates to provide feedback on the company, either positive or negative. We aim at keeping a constant and two-way communication channel.
There are two main types of one-on-ones between a leader and their direct reports:
- Monthly checkpoints (every 4 weeks)
- 360 Review (every 6 months)
For software engineers, these sessions are held with their Engineering Leads. While for designers and product managers, these sessions are held with the Chief Product Officer.